Idea of a Jewish people invented, says historian by Jonathan Cook No one is more surprised than Shlomo Sand that his latest academic work has spent 19 weeks on Israel's bestseller list – and that success has come to the history professor despite his book challenging Israel's biggest taboo.Dr. Sand argues that the idea of a Jewish nation – whose need for a safe haven was originally used to justify the founding of the state of Israel – is a myth invented little more than a century ago.An expert on European history at Tel Aviv University, Dr. Sand drew on extensive historical and archaeological research to support not only this claim but several more – all equally controversial.In addition, he argues that the Jews were never exiled from the Holy Land, that most of today's Jews have no historical connection to the land called Israel and that the only political solution to the country's conflict with the Palestinians is to abolish the Jewish state.The success of When and How Was the Jewish People Invented? looks likely to be repeated around the world. A French edition, launched last month, is selling so fast that it has already had three print runs.Translations are under way into a dozen languages, including Arabic and English. But he predicted a rough ride from the pro-Israel lobby when the book is launched by his English publisher, Verso, in the United States next year.In contrast, he said Israelis had been, if not exactly supportive, at least curious about his argument. Tom Segev, one of the country's leading journalists, has called the book "fascinating and challenging."Surprisingly, Dr. Sand said, most of his academic colleagues in Israel have shied away from tackling his arguments. One exception is Israel Bartal, a professor of Jewish history at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Writing in Haaretz, the Israeli daily newspaper, Dr. Bartal made little effort to rebut Dr. Sand's claims. He dedicated much of his article instead to defending his profession, suggesting that Israeli historians were not as ignorant about the invented nature of Jewish history as Dr. Sand contends.The idea for the book came to him many years ago, Dr. Sand said, but he waited until recently to start working on it. "I cannot claim to be particularly courageous in publishing the book now," he said. "I waited until I was a full professor. There is a price to be paid in Israeli academia for expressing views of this sort."Dr. Sand's main argument is that until little more than a century ago, Jews thought of themselves as Jews only because they shared a common religion. At the turn of the 20th century, he said, Zionist Jews challenged this idea and started creating a national history by inventing the idea that Jews existed as a people separate from their religion.Equally, the modern Zionist idea of Jews being obligated to return from exile to the Promised Land was entirely alien to Judaism, he added."Zionism changed the idea of Jerusalem. Before, the holy places were seen as places to long for, not to be lived in. For 2,000 years Jews stayed away from Jerusalem not because they could not return but because their religion forbade them from returning until the messiah came."The biggest surprise during his research came when he started looking at the archaeological evidence from the biblical era."I was not raised as a Zionist, but like all other Israelis I took it for granted that the Jews were a people living in Judea and that they were exiled by the Romans in 70AD."But once I started looking at the evidence, I discovered that the kingdoms of David and Solomon were legends. "Similarly with the exile. In fact, you can't explain Jewishness without exile. But when I started to look for history books describing the events of this exile, I couldn't find any. Not one."That was because the Romans did not exile people. In fact, Jews in Palestine were overwhelming peasants and all the evidence suggests they stayed on their lands." Instead, he believes an alternative theory is more plausible: the exile was a myth promoted by early Christians to recruit Jews to the new faith. "Christians wanted later generations of Jews to believe that their ancestors had been exiled as a punishment from God."So if there was no exile, how is it that so many Jews ended up scattered around the globe before the modern state of Israel began encouraging them to "return"?Dr. Sand said that, in the centuries immediately preceding and following the Christian era, Judaism was a proselytizing religion, desperate for converts. "This is mentioned in the Roman literature of the time."Jews traveled to other regions seeking converts, particularly in Yemen and among the Berber tribes of North Africa. Centuries later, the people of the Khazar kingdom in what is today south Russia, would convert en masse to Judaism, becoming the genesis of the Ashkenazi Jews of central and eastern Europe.Dr. Sand pointed to the strange state of denial in which most Israelis live, noting that papers offered extensive coverage recently to the discovery of the capital of the Khazar kingdom next to the Caspian Sea.Ynet, the website of Israel's most popular newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth, headlined the story: "Russian archaeologists find long-lost Jewish capital." And yet none of the papers, he added, had considered the significance of this find to standard accounts of Jewish history.One further question is prompted by Dr. Sand's account, as he himself notes: if most Jews never left the Holy Land, what became of them?"It is not taught in Israeli schools but most of the early Zionist leaders, including David Ben Gurion [Israel's first prime minister], believed that the Palestinians were the descendants of the area's original Jews. They believed the Jews had later converted to Islam."Dr. Sand attributed his colleagues' reticence to engage with him to an implicit acknowledgement by many that the whole edifice of "Jewish history" taught at Israeli universities is built like a house of cards.The problem with the teaching of history in Israel, Dr. Sand said, dates to a decision in the 1930s to separate history into two disciplines: general history and Jewish history. Jewish history was assumed to need its own field of study because Jewish experience was considered unique."There's no Jewish department of politics or sociology at the universities. Only history is taught in this way, and it has allowed specialists in Jewish history to live in a very insular and conservative world where they are not touched by modern developments in historical research. "I've been criticized in Israel for writing about Jewish history when European history is my specialty. But a book like this needed a historian who is familiar with the standard concepts of historical inquiry used by academia in the rest of the world."This article originally appeared in The National, published in Abu Dhabi.

by Jonathan Cook A reader recently e-mailed to ask if anyone else was suggesting, as I have done, that Hezbollah's rocket fire may not be quite as indiscriminate or maliciously targeted at Israeli civilians as is commonly assumed. I had to admit that I have been plowing a lonely furrow on this one. Still, that is no reason in itself to join everyone else, even if the consensus includes every mainstream commentator as well as groups such as Human Rights Watch.

First, let us get my argument straight. I have not claimed, as most of my critics wish to argue, that Hezbollah targets only military sites or that it never aims at civilians. According to the Israeli army, more than 3,300 rockets have hit Israel over the past four weeks. How can I know, or even claim to know, where all those rockets have landed, or know what the Hezbollah operatives who fired each rocket intended to hit? I have never made such claims.

What I have argued instead is twofold. First, we cannot easily know what Hezbollah is trying to hit because Israel has located most of its army camps, weapons factories, and military installations near or inside civilian communities. If a Hezbollah rocket slams into an Israeli town with a weapons factory, should we count that as an attack on civilians or on a military site?

The claim being made against Hezbollah in Lebanon – that it is "cowardly blending" with civilians, according to the UN's Jan Egeland – can, in truth, be made far more convincingly of the Israeli army. While there has been little convincing evidence that Hezbollah is firing its rocket from towns and villages in south Lebanon, or that its fighters are hiding there among civilians, it can be known beyond a shadow of a doubt that Israeli army camps and military installations are based in northern Israeli communities.

An obvious point that no one seems to be making – and given a news blackout that lasted several hours, Israel clearly hoped no one would make – is that the 12 soldiers who were killed on Sunday in Kfar Giladi by a Hezbollah rocket were, under Egeland's definition, "cowardly blending" with the civilian population of that community. We know there are still civilians in Giladi because their response to the rocket barrage was quoted in the Israeli media.

My second claim was that Israel's military censor is preventing foreign journalists based in Israel, myself included, from discussing where Hezbollah rockets are landing, and what they may be aimed at. Under the censorship rules, it is impossible to mention any issue that touches on Israeli security or defense matters: the location of military installations, for example, cannot be divulged. It is arguable whether it would actually be possible to report a Hezbollah strike that hit a military site inside Israel.

I therefore have to tread carefully in what I say next, relying on information that is already publicly available, but which at least challenges the simplistic view that Hezbollah is firing rockets either indiscriminately or willfully to kill civilians. I draw on two pieces of coverage provided by BBC World.

On Tuesday, the BBC's Katya Adler reported from the northern community of Kiryat Shmona, which has taken the heaviest pounding from Hezbollah rockets and from which many of the local residents have fled over the past month. As she stood on a central street describing the difficult conditions under which the remaining families were living, she had to shout over the rhythmic bark of what sounded like an Israeli tank close by firing into Lebanon. She made no mention of what was doing the firing – and given the censorship laws, my assumption is she cannot. But it does raise the question of how much of a civilian target Kiryat Shmona really is.

Consider also this. Throughout the four weeks of fighting, the BBC has had a presenter and film crew at the top of an area of Haifa known as the Panorama, above the beautiful Bahai Gardens. As the name suggests, from there the film crew has had an unrestricted view of the port and docks below and the wide arc of heavily developed shoreline that stretches up to Acre.

The spot where the BBC presenters have been standing, telling us regularly that they can hear the wail of sirens warning Haifa's residents to head for the shelters, is in the center of this sprawling ridge-top city, in one of the most heavily built up and inhabited areas of Haifa. So why have the BBC's presenters been standing there calmly every day for weeks under the barrage of rockets?

Because all the evidence suggests that Hezbollah has not been trying to hit the center of Haifa, where it would be certain of inflicting high casualties, whether its rockets were on target or slightly adrift. Instead, as BBC presenters have repeatedly shown us, the overwhelming majority of rockets land either in the mostly-abandoned port area or fall short into the bay – and on the odd occasion travel a little too far, as one did on Sunday landing on an Arab neighborhood near the port and killing two inhabitants.

If Hezbollah's primary goal is to kill as many civilians as possible in Haifa, it seems to be going about it in a very strange manner indeed – unless we are to believe that none of its rockets could be fired the extra 1 km needed to hit central Haifa. Instead, as is clear from the view shown by BBC cameras, the port includes many sites far more "strategic" than the roads, bridges, milk factories, and power stations Israel is destroying in Lebanon: it has the oil refinery, the naval docks, and other installations that, yes, I cannot mention because of the censorship laws.

At the very least, we should concede to Hezbollah that it is not always targeting civilians, and very possibly is not mainly targeting civilians, which might in part explain the comparatively low Israeli civilian casualty figures.

That said, there are two valid criticisms, both made by Human Rights Watch, of Hezbollah's rocket fire – though exactly the same or worse criticisms can be made of the Israeli army. Those, unlike HRW, who single out Hezbollah are being either disingenuous or hypocritical.

One is that Hezbollah has filled many of its rockets with ball bearings. Most critics of Hezbollah take this as conclusive proof that the group's only intent is to kill and injure civilians. Anyone who has seen the damage done by a Katyusha rocket will realize that it is not a very powerful weapon: it essentially punches a hole in whatever it hits. The biggest danger is from the shrapnel and from anything added – like ball bearings – that sprays out on impact. The shrapnel can kill civilians nearby, of course, but it can also kill soldiers – as we saw at Kfar Giladi – and can puncture tanks containing flammable liquids such as petrol, causing explosions.

The damage inflicted by the ball bearings is not in itself proof that Hezbollah is trying to kill Israeli civilians, any more than Israel's use of far more lethal cluster bombs is proof that it wants to kill Lebanese civilians. Both are acting according to the gruesome realities of war: they want to inflict as much damage as possible with each rocket strike. That is deplorable, but so is war.

The second criticism made by HRW is that because Hezbollah's rockets are rudimentary and lack sophisticated guidance systems they are as good as indiscriminate. That conclusion is wrong both logically and semantically. As I have tried to show, the rockets are mostly not indiscriminate (though presumably some misfire, as do Israeli missiles); rather, they are not precise.

This, according to Human Rights Watch, still makes Hezbollah's rocket attacks war crimes. That may be true, but it of course also means Israel's missile strikes and bombardment of Lebanon are war crimes on the same or a greater scale. Hezbollah's strikes against civilians may be intentional or they may be the result of inaccurate guidance systems trying to hit military targets. Israel's strikes against civilians are either intentional or the result of accurate guidance systems and very faulty, to the point of reckless, military intelligence.

Finally, what about the defense offered by Israel's supporters that its air force tries to avoid harming Lebanese civilians by leafleting them before an attack to warn them that they must leave? The argument's thrust is that only those who belong to Hezbollah or give it succor remain behind in south Lebanon and they are therefore legitimate targets. (It ignores, of course, hundreds of civilians killed in areas that have not been leafleted or who were trying to flee, as ordered, when hit by an Israeli missile.)

Hezbollah, of course, has done precisely the same. In speeches, its leader Hassan Nasrallah has repeatedly warned Israeli residents of areas like Haifa, Afula, Hadera, and Tel Aviv that Hezbollah will hit these cities with rockets days before it has actually done so. Hezbollah can claim just as fairly that it has given Israelis fair warning of its attacks on civilian communities, and that any who remain have only themselves to blame.

This debate is important because it will determine in the coming months and years who will be blamed by the international community – and future historians – for committing war crimes. Hezbollah deserves as fair a hearing as Israel, though at the moment it most certainly is not getting it.

Like every army in a war, Hezbollah may not be acting in a humane manner. But it is demonstrably acting according to the same standards as the Israeli army – and possibly, given Israel's siting of military targets in civilian areas, higher ones. The fact that the contrary view is almost universally held betrays our prejudices rather than anything about Hezbollah's acts.

Hamas cannot be defeated, so it must be brought to heel by Jonathan Cook Ever since Hamas triumphed in the Palestinian elections nearly three years ago, the story in Israel has been that a full-scale ground invasion of the Gaza Strip was imminent. But even when public pressure mounted for a decisive blow against Hamas, the government backed off from a frontal assault.

Now the world waits for Ehud Barak, the defense minister, to send in the tanks and troops as the logic of this operation is pushing inexorably towards a ground war. Nonetheless, officials have been stalling. Significant ground forces are massed on Gaza's border, but still the talk in Israel is of "exit strategies," lulls and renewed ceasefires.

Even if Israeli tanks do lumber into the enclave, will they dare to move into the real battlegrounds of central Gaza? Or will they simply be used, as they have been in the past, to terrorize the civilian population on the peripheries?

Israelis are aware of the official reason for Mr. Barak's reticence to follow the air strikes with a large-scale ground war. They have been endlessly reminded that the worst losses sustained by the army in the second intifada took place in 2002 during the invasion of Jenin refugee camp.

Gaza, as Israelis know only too well, is one mammoth refugee camp. Its narrow alleys, incapable of being negotiated by Merkava tanks, will force Israeli soldiers out into the open. Gaza, in the Israeli imagination, is a death trap.

Similarly, no one has forgotten the heavy toll on Israeli soldiers during the ground war with Hezbollah in 2006. In a country such as Israel, with a citizen army, the public has become positively phobic of a war in which large numbers of its sons will be placed in the firing line.

That fear is only heightened by reports in the Israeli media that Hamas is praying for the chance to engage Israel's army in serious combat. The decision to sacrifice many soldiers in Gaza is not one Mr. Barak, leader of the Labor Party, will take lightly with an election in six weeks.

But there is another concern that has given him equal cause to hesitate.

Despite the popular rhetoric in Israel, no senior official really believes Hamas can be destroyed, either from the air or with brigades of troops. It is simply too entrenched in Gaza.

That conclusion is acknowledged in the tepid rationales offered so far for Israel's operations. "Creating calm in the country's south" and "changing the security environment" have been preferred over previous favorites, such as "rooting out the infrastructure of terror."

An invasion whose real objective was the toppling of Hamas would, as Mr. Barak and his officials understand, require the permanent military reoccupation of Gaza.

But overturning the disengagement from Gaza – the 2005 brainchild of Ariel Sharon, the prime minister at the time – would entail a huge military and financial commitment from Israel. It would once again have to assume responsibility for the welfare of the local civilian population, and the army would be forced into treacherous policing of Gaza's teeming camps.

In effect, an invasion of Gaza to overthrow Hamas would be a reversal of the trend in Israeli policy since the Oslo process of the early 1990s.

It was then that Israel allowed the long-exiled Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, to return to the occupied territories in the new role of head of the Palestinian Authority. Naively, Arafat assumed he was leading a government-in-waiting. In truth, he simply became Israel's chief security contractor.

Arafat was tolerated during the 1990s because he did little to stop Israel's effective annexation of large parts of the West Bank through the rapid expansion of settlements and increasingly harsh movement restrictions on Palestinians. Instead, he concentrated on building up the security forces of his Fatah loyalists, containing Hamas and preparing for a statehood that never arrived.

When the second intifada broke out, Arafat proved he had outlived his usefulness to Israel. His Palestinian Authority was gradually emasculated.

Since Arafat's death and the disengagement from Gaza, Israel has sought to consolidate the physical separation of the Strip from the much-coveted West Bank. Even if not originally desired by Israel, Hamas's takeover of Gaza has contributed significantly to that goal.

Israel is now faced by two Palestinian national movements. The Fatah one, based in the West Bank and led by a weak president, Mahmoud Abbas, is largely discredited and compliant. The other, Hamas, based in Gaza, has grown in confidence as it claims to be the true guardian of resistance to the occupation.

Unable to destroy Hamas, Israel is now considering whether to live with the armed group next door.

Hamas has proved it can enforce its rule in Gaza much as Arafat once did in both occupied territories. The question being debated in Israel's cabinet and war rooms is whether, like Arafat, Hamas can be made to collude with the occupation. It has proved it is strong, but can it be made useful to Israel, too?

In practice that would mean taming Hamas rather than crushing it. Whereas Israel is trying to build up Fatah in the West Bank with carrots, it is using the current slaughter in Gaza as a big stick with which to beat Hamas into compliance.

The ultimate objective is another truce stopping the rocket fire out of the Strip, like the six-month ceasefire that just ended, but on terms even more favorable to Israel.

The savage blockade that has deprived Gaza's population of essentials for many months failed to achieve that goal. Instead, Hamas quickly took charge of the smuggling tunnels that became a lifeline for Gazans. The tunnels raised Hamas's finances and popularity in equal measure.

It should come as no surprise that Israel has barely bothered to hit the Hamas leadership or its military wing. Instead it has bombed the tunnels, Hamas's treasure chest, and it has killed substantial numbers of ordinary policemen, the guarantors of law and order in Gaza. Latest reports suggest Israel is now planning to expand its air strikes to Hamas's welfare organizations, the charities that are the base of its popularity.

The air campaign is paring down Hamas's ability to function effectively as the ruler of Gaza. It is undermining Hamas's political power bases. The lesson is not that Hamas can be destroyed militarily but that it that can be weakened domestically.

Israel apparently hopes to persuade the Hamas leadership, as it did Arafat for a while, that its best interests are served by cooperating with Israel. The message is: forget about your popular mandate to resist the occupation and concentrate instead on remaining in power with our help.

In the fog of war, events may yet escalate in such a way that a serious ground invasion cannot be avoided, especially if Hamas continues to fire rockets into Israel. But whatever happens, Israel and Hamas are almost certain in the end to agree to another ceasefire.

The issue will be whether in doing so, Hamas, like Arafat before it, loses sight of its primary task: to force Israel to end its occupation.

This article originally appeared in The National, published in Abu Dhabi.